Are You There Proust? It’s Me, Natalie

I have not been single for more than two weeks since I was fifteen. I remember a friend of mine asking why I always had to have a boyfriend, why I couldn’t just date around, or, better yet, be alone. I thought about it for a few seconds, though perhaps not long enough because my impetuous answer was that I was scared of loneliness and that when I am alone, I am not sure if I exist or not. This sounds completely silly and will reveal to you all that blonde stereotypes are not complete fabrications, but there is so much truth in what I said. Always having someone by your side reassures or validates you, your thoughts, opinions, emotions, reactions experiences, etc. And when all of a sudden there is no one to play this role, you are left feeling anxious about everything. As though if there is no one to talk to, there is no talk, no thoughts, no life. The end.

This is how I relate to Marcel in The Captive. He narrates,

“I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain.”

She, like a mirror, reflects and tells him about himself, his “way.” She tells him how impossibly angry he can become, and this makes him aware of himself, his tone. He needs her to reflect the parts of himself that he is oblivious to back onto him. He needs to constantly discover himself, know himself and explore obscure parts of himself.

Obviously Marcel is pathetic. But what I like is that he is not ashamed of this. He wants to work through this for himself. He needs to clothe Albertine in “Fortuny” gowns that become a material mark that represents his possession of her. He makes no secret of his thousands of interpretations of her cocked head, sidelong glance, sigh, hesitation and any other tiny gesture; as I have also done with the body language of friends and family, but never had the guts to admit.

His confessions and detailed observations of himself are written like diary entries. In The Guermantes’ Way, he talks about his writing as a task he does most days, but his “musings” are something he takes up constantly, day in, day out. Francoise and St-Loup would interrupt his “musings” just as he was getting deeply into them and this frustrated him. (Who has time to engage in musing all day anyhow?)

But his openness, maybe combined with my willingness as his reader to relate to him, has invited me to share myself with him. As if to console him, and defend him against criticism. I even talk to him. I think as quietly as his writing speaks, but my words are sometimes harsh: “I expected more from you!” after a long and anti-climactic passage. But sometimes reading him just makes me sad for him. It is he who is the captive. Marcel is contained by his own fears, and writing is his way of confronting these darker sides of himself. My only hope is that, like mine is in my diary, his writing was a form of ventilation or a purging of negativity and held a bias for his most painful moments, after the release of which he, Marcel the man, was able to enjoy some of the time in his life that didn’t involve jealousy, anxiety, illness…

-natalie